Right Minds

What sets conservatives apart from authoritarians and fascists?

Radicals, liberals, and progressives have dismissed conservatism as a mental defect ever since it emerged as a distinctive brand of political thought with the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. According to Thomas Paine, Burke’s opposition to the revolution was based on an “obliteration of knowledge.” Several decades later, John Stuart Mill asserted that, although not all conservatives are stupid, “most stupid people are conservative.” In the mid-20th century, Theodore Adorno diagnosed conservative views as symptoms of a pathological “authoritarian personality.” More recently, some neuroscientists have argued that conservatives have bigger amygdalae than liberals. This turns out to be far from complimentary: the amygdala is the region of the brain associated with feelings of fear and disgust rather than thinking.

Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, rejects such reductive accounts. As the title of his recently published The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin suggests, he thinks conservatives do have functioning brains. The purpose of the book is to “get inside” them more deeply than other writers on the left have been able to do.

The results of his exploratory surgery are provocative. Robin concludes that conservatism is neither a disposition in favor of the tried and true, as the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott proposed, nor a principled commitment to limited government, as many contemporaries believe. Instead, he argues, conservatism is a “reactionary ideology” that defends hierarchy against the upheavals that began with the French Revolution.

Robin’s own conception of politics as a perennial struggle for liberation owes something to Marx, but his description of conservatism as an “ideology” does not mean that he regards it as a fig leaf for self-interest. On the contrary, conservatism “provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity.”

The flexibility and power of the conservative ideology, in his view, comes from the fact that the structure of this argument can be preserved even as the identity of the “lower orders” changes. What’s important is that conservatives insist on the right of the better to command the worse, however conceived, against the revolutionary claim that no one has the inherent authority to rule anyone else.

Robin has been criticized for assimilating modern American conservatism to its European forebears. In particular, he has trouble making sense of the populist and libertarian appeals that have characterized the movement from the Goldwater campaign to the Tea Parties. George III had Burke right when he thanked him for supporting “the cause of the gentlemen.” But Sarah Palin?

Yet excessive generalization is not the book’s greatest flaw. The main problem is that Robin is so eager to make the connection between past and present that he does not develop the classic position in detail. A “consistent and profound argument” deserves careful analysis. In TheReactionary Mind, we get a few intriguing but not exactly dispositive quotes from Burke and his Francophone disciple Joseph de Maistre.

That’s a shame, because Robin is onto something that many of his critics have missed. Classical conservatism is a coherent theoryof opposition to the French Revolution and its consequences. And it doesinsist on hierarchy in human affairs, both public and private. But what the great sociologist Robert Nisbet called the “dogmatics” of conservatism cannot be understood by reflecting on Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, or other 20th-century publicists who loom large in The Reactionary Mind. The counterrevolutionary ideology has to be articulated on its own terms before it is connected to the dilemmas of contemporary politics.

• • •

The French Revolution was not the first revolution in human or even European history. Mobs had ruled the streets before; princes had often enough been deposed. Yet Burke insisted that that the Revolution was “the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.” What was so astonishing about it?

Burke’s answer was that the French Revolution was the consequence of an extraordinary new theory of society. According to this theory, which Burke attributed to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, human beings are naturally free and self-sufficient. Because each man is potentially a Crusoe, any relations between individuals are essentially voluntary.

The question, then, is whether the “chains” that bind one person to another reflect the will of every individual involved. If so, they are legitimate—a term that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to transform from a principle of dynastic succession into the moral justification of rule as such. If not, they lack moral authority and may be rejected, potentially with violence. So, in Burke’s view, went the philosophical argument behind the revolution.

This reasoning was mistaken, Burke argued, not so much in its logical structure as in its first principle. In fact, human beings are born into networks of sympathy, obligation, and authority. These networks make us what we are, transforming unformed potential and dispositions into concrete identities. On this view, there is no Archimedean point from which the legitimacy of existing social relations can be assessed. As Maistre put it in a brilliant formulation, “In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians… . But, as for Man, I declare that I have never met him in my life. If he exists, I certainly have no knowledge of him.”

If the social arrangements that characterize national communities are background conditions of humanity, they are not legitimatized by the consent of those who participate in them at any given time. Instead, they derive their authority from they way that they bind together past, present, and future in an enduring partnership. It follows that men and women of today have no right to dissolve the partnership in which they are involved merely because it seems inconvenient to them. Society, which always means a particular society, is an “entailed inheritance,” like a landed estate whose owner is legally prohibited from selling.

The social connections that the French conservative Louis de Bonald dubbed “relationships” are not necessarily political. Every society needs a government, but government is only one part of society. Like the structures of political rule, however, relationships are inherently hierarchical. Although they aim to secure a common good, one party or element to every social connection always has the capacity to make decisions concerning the disposition of the whole. For Bonald, the model for this capacity is God’s rule over the universe, which is reproduced in microcosm in the kingdom and the household. Burke presented the same idea using another classic theological image: the chain of being that descends from heaven to earth, articulating divine influence over the created world as it passes through a succession of smaller units including the nation, the feudal manor, and the family.

It would be misleading to extract the conservatives’ argument for authority from this religious context. Although not all were conventionally pious, the classical conservatives agreed that human relations could only be understood as part of a providential order of Creation. But this does not mean that they insisted on their principles in defiance of experience. History and daily practice show that authority permeates human interactions. Each of us constantly defers to superiors and directs inferiors, if only our own children. It is true that children eventually grow up and establish households of their own. But the structure of authority remains the same even if the persons who occupy the various positions change.

From this point of view, the radicalism of the French Revolution was notthat it aimed to alter relations of authority in favor of the previously subordinate. The desire of subjects to rule kings, servants to dominate their masters, sons to command fathers might be misguided. But it was readily understandable, and certainly nothing new. The real issue was the Revolution’s implicit aim of establishing a condition in which nobody would obey anyone else unless he agreed to do so. This aspiration, the conservatives insisted, was not merely unwise, but actually insane.

The point of Joseph de Maistre’s counterrevolutionary theory of sovereignty, which Robin correctly links to Thomas Hobbes, is thus that someone must be in a position to decide and command if any relationship is to function. On the political level, Maistre strongly preferred monarchy, but he acknowledged that even the tyranny of the majority is better than anarchy. For without some authoritative element, society would be impossible.

• • •

Yet the counterrevolutionaries were not simply authoritarians. Unlike Hobbes, to whom it was a matter of indifference who ruled so long as someone did so, Burke and his disciples were deeply concerned with the character of the wielders of power. This was not simply a matter of natural endowments, although the conservatives did observe reasonably enough that men are not born equal in strength, intelligence, or other capacities. Instead, the classical conservatives insisted that only certain persons are in a position to develop the skills and habits that fit them for rule, not for their personal enjoyment, but rather to secure the common good that is available only when men acknowledge the distinctions that God and nature have established.

No one should be mocked or oppressed because of the way he earns his living, Burke insists. Yet he echoes Aristotle’s argument against political participation by tradesmen when he insists that “the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”

The content of the relevant distinctions, however, is a point of difference between the conservative tradition as it developed in the English-speaking world and on the Continent. Although it was fundamentally anti-egalitarian, the former took its bearing from the ideal of the gentleman, who did not necessarily bear a title of nobility and was most at home on his rural estate. For Burke, the possession and care of landed property had a central role in cultivating the virtues necessary to rule others well. As the reference to an “entailed inheritance” suggests, Burke saw the management of an estate and its tenants as the basic model of harmonious social relations. On the other hand, those who earn their living from rapid exchange can hardly resist habits of short-term thinking, deference to the whims of customers, and the less than frank speech necessary to succeed in business.

Even a successful merchant, then, could not make himself into a gentleman. He might, however, hope to be successful enough that his grandsons would be. The assumption that social mobility is possible, although never frequent or easy, inclined English-style conservatism to the idea of a powerful but permeable aristocracy. Burke’s own rise from obscure man of letters to the ideologue of the establishment testifies to the plausibility of this assumption.

But “the spirit of the gentleman,” as Burke called it, did not exist in the same way on the Continent, partly because European titles passed to all of a nobleman’s sons rather than only to the eldest. In its place, Bonald, Maistre, and German counterparts like Friedrich Gentz deferred to the nobility of the sword. The natural rulers, as they saw them, were not a class of squires periodically refreshed by talented outsiders. They were the titled commanders of armies.

Continental conservatives generally acknowledged the necessity of a class of civil servants to administer the state. But they rejected the Aristotelian principle that participation in politics is an important component of virtue, in favor of a military monasticism that alienated the elite from the society that it was supposed to lead. Among the reasons that Burke’s conservatism supported his commitment to parliamentary government, by contrast, was that he saw politics as a fit occupation for a gentleman. Indeed, one of Burke’s central criticisms of the French Revolution is that its subversion of all civil authority made military dictatorship inevitable—an outcome for which he had no sympathy whatsoever.

Despite their disagreement about who the natural rulers were, Burke and his European counterparts agreed about how this rule was to be exercised. In both cases, power was to be constrained by the complex structure of relationships that make up a whole society. A father might be the authority in his own home, but he owed obedience to the local lord of the manor. The lord might rule his estate, but not in defiance of the king. And the king had to be prepared to account for himself before God for his stewardship of these relationships, which are not of his making or subject to his will.

Burke’s insistence that good government is always limited government is well known. But Maistre, who has the reputation of a crazed absolutist, insisted on the same principle. Elaborating his theory of sovereignty, Maistre explains that while sovereignty must, in certain senses, be absolute, it should never be arbitrary or exercised outside its proper sphere. Although the king’s will must not be challenged, “Religion, laws, customs, opinion, and class and corporate privileges restrain the sovereign and prevent him from abusing his power…”

The insistence that power be embedded in restraining traditions and institutions is the crucial distinction between classical conservatism and the fascism that would eventually replace it on the European right. Conservatism defends the authority of lords, of generals, of kings—but not of a “leader” who emerges from and rules over the disorganized mob.

In The Reactionary Mind, Robin tries to efface this distinction by quoting Maistre’s arguments that the restoration of the king would require the participation of the people. But he ignores Maistre’s insistence that the restored order be monarchical—and indeed that the crown continue in the line of succession that had been interrupted when Louis XVI was executed. The template for the populist dictatorship that Robin associates with conservatism was not the Bourbon Restoration. As Burke foresaw, it was the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom even Maistre opposed.

• • •

There is more to the reactionary ideology than I have been able to consider here. This sketch, however, should be enough to support some conclusions about the character of conservatism as it developed at the end of the 18th century.

First, conservatism was not simply a posture or disposition. Instead, it was an elaborate system of ideas comparable to the liberal rationalism that it opposed. This ideology may be reactionary, but it is by no means stupid. That is why it was credited by great progressives of the 19th century, including Auguste Comte, as the source of the profound insight that man is not a solitary creature but exists only in and through society—with all the constraints that entails.

Second, the central principle of conservatism was authority. Specifically, conservatism was an attempt to justify theoretically the political and social hierarchies that the French Revolution challenged. This means that classical conservatism is inextricable from anti-egalitarianism. Its major premise is that men are not created equal—and that they actually become less and less so as they develop their faculties through the enactment of various social roles.

But despite its anti-egalitarianism, classical conservatism cannot be assimilated to anything like fascism. This is not because it is more or less “extreme,” a comparative adjective that has no ahistorical meaning. It is because conservatism insists that authority is constituted but at the same time limited by the network of relationships that make up society.

Some of the counterrevolutionaries did, in their darker moments, despair of restoring institutions whose roots had withered. Maistre even suggested that the revolution was God’s judgment on a sinful humanity. But, as the political theorist Mark Lilla recently pointed out in TheNew York Review of Books, the characteristic vice of the original conservatism was pessimism rather than mad hope that a new world was to be born from the destruction of the old. As Maistre concluded in his Considerations of France, “the restoration of the monarchy, what they call the counter-revolution, will not be a contrary revolution, but the contrary of revolution.”

What does this backward-looking, theologically inflected ideology of hierarchy have to with the contemporary America conservative movement? The answer is: not much. In addition to the historical distance, the concept of individual rights imposes an unbridgeable theoretical gap between the two positions. Classical conservatism is essentially communitarian, and locates individuals in structures of obligation that are not derived from their choice or consent. The American conservative movement, on the other hand, appeals to many of same beliefs about natural freedom and equality that inspired the French Revolution.

These appeals are most obvious in the libertarian strand of the movement, which cannot simply be dismissed as an apology for economic exploitation. They are most destructive, however, when they are used to motivate and justify our perennially adventurist foreign policy. According to the ideologues of American exceptionalism, there really is such a thing as Man in the abstract. And Man has the same rights and desires in Afghanistan that he has in Arizona. The purpose of government is to secure these rights. To the extent that it aims to do so universally, the government of the United States is therefore the universal government, with the responsibility to reorder all the traditional loyalties and obligations that define “illegitimate” societies.

No matter which party endorses this vision, it is difficult to imagine anything more distant than from “the contrary of revolution” inspired by Burke and articulated by Maistre. For it is a mirror image of the very Revolution that they opposed. In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin suggests that Americans need to understand conservatism better in order to resist it. If he were to make good the promise of his title, he and others of the left might find something to admire.

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Although many libertarians are guilty of reasoning from the abstractions of the French Revolution, this is not a necessary aspect of libertarianism. In fact, the most radical, “anarcho-” libertarians are perhaps the most conservative in the communitarian way because they advocate the widest dispersal of power and authority into groups and subgroups. They also acknowledge non-chosen political obligations, i.e., respect for property rights and procedures of justice. Finally, they favor an organic society in the fullest sense, often with a political structure of the customary or common law style which is able to avoid stagnation and the establishment of a sovereign Fuhrer instead of a sovereign method of adjudication for resolving internal disputes and facilitating social life.

All I’m saying is that we must be careful when painting with broad strokes. On the whole, the article is fantastic and I will be passing it along – especially to my libertarian friends who misunderstand conservatism 🙂

American conservatism is based (or should be) on the cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Wealth, family background, or title have nothing to do with a natural (so called) hierarchy of rule. Not in our republic anyway. All problems come to a political system when the virtues are ignored and a elitist class develops. This is the problem we are dealing with now. Some of the most base, stupid, and despicable people I have met have come from wealthy, privileged families. My form of conservatism comes not from the hoity toity of England or Europe but from the likes of Jackson/Lincoln. So there!

In America, true conservatism is the same as libertarianism, as both terms refer to the rule of law established in the Declaration (the first statute of the U.S.) and the Constitution, both of which define the limits of government. In other words, both libertarians and conservatives (not neo-cons) abide founding documents as the prescription of true liberty.

Jackson and Lincoln are the American embodiment of the principles of Jacobinism and the French Revolution; to identify conservatism or a conservative disposition in either of them is to empty the term of any real meaning. So long as movement conservatives ignore or dismiss this fact, the “Party of Lincoln” will continue to talk a good game while growing the size and scope of government to ever new and monstrous heights, both here and abroad.

“And Man has the same rights and desires in Afghanistan that he has in Arizona. The purpose of government is to secure these rights. To the extent that it aims to do so universally, the government of the United States is therefore the universal government, with the responsibility to reorder all the traditional loyalties and obligations that define “illegitimate” societies.”

That really IS a fig leave for self-interested opportunism, even though I do believe human beings do have the same general right to pursue self-government. What our elites impose in their own interests using whatever excuses, can certainly never be that, however.

1. Mark Lilla is affiliated with the neocon school, interestingly, he is an apostate Christian evangelical, reborn as an agnostic. His book, “The Stillborn God” is a work of real insight, and hidden in its bowels is a critique of Eric Voegelin as well as neo-orthodox Protestant theology. Another blow to compassionate conservatism.

2. I think it is fascinating that Goldman comes up to the goal line, with the not-terribly-shocking discovery that American libertarian-conservatives are really European liberals…then he genuflects with the standard neocon bashing reference to Afghanistan and cultural relativism (something Burke arguably woould have understood), without any real explanation as to why Robert Filmer’s “false idea” is really true – or how the abstraction “Man” is a heresy to anyone who is not a Randian objectivist. Confused, and confusing.

Ah, is it starting to get through? Since 1776 predates 1789, the American Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique which, to put it at its politest, must reassess entirely the Founding Fathers and their work.

That critique must draw on sources from the Continent, but its main source is the wellspring of doubt about the entire legitimacy of the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology. That doubt was passed down among Catholics, High Churchmen (and then first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others, giving rise in Britain to the campaign against the slave trade, to Tory and Radical extensions of the franchise, to Tory and Radical uses of government action against social evils, to the emergence of the Labour Movement, and to the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.

Those who would rightly locate the American experiment within a wider British tradition need to recognize that this is the wider British tradition in question, and that it necessarily includes the most searing critique of the Founding Fathers and of their Deism and their classical liberalism, which latter, at least, is the only ideology of the American Republic that they founded That is not necessarily the only American Republic that there could ever be. But it is the one currently in existence.

Conservatism is not really a belief system…it is a way to maintain the status quo. It is a way to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is a way to prevent challenges to existing authority. There is nothing more to it than that.

“Conservatism is not really a belief system…it is a way to maintain the status quo. It is a way to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is a way to prevent challenges to existing authority. There is nothing more to it than that.”

Ah. As opposed to another way, which may simply involve swapping the identity of the “rich” and the “poor.” Change the czar, for a commisar. Or maybe a way which reduces us all to beggars, hankering after nanny’s teat. That’s fair, although hopefully … hopefully … there won’t be anything more to dear nanny, than that.

As the essay appears to indicate, at least in part, conservatisim is a way to raise young men to be ordered and self-sacrificing gentlemen. There can be rich predatory boobs; and poor geniuses of the cut-throat variety. But if we have the gentlemen, dear sirs, there is the chance the world may be a more tolerable and charitable place.

Not a bad belief system, on the whole.

To be sure, I question whether the rich minions of Wall Street would buy it. Then again, those poor squatters occupying the Street, to all appearances, aren’t buying it either.

“Wealth, family background, or title have nothing to do with a natural (so called) hierarchy of rule. Not in our republic anyway. All problems come to a political system when the virtues are ignored and a elitist class develops. This is the problem we are dealing with now.”

not with a natural (so called) hierarchy of rule, though i’d say there is no natural hierarchy of rule at all: it comes down to force every time. the reaction against hierarchy of rule is as natural as the attempt to enforce one. and when, in this or any other republic, did wealth, family background, or title not form the basis of hierarchy of rule? we’re no more dealing with this now than they were 225 years ago.

On a philosophical level, the American Revolution was a product of the enlightenment as was the French. For this reason, there is no American conservatism in the continental European sense and little even in the British sense. American conservatism is simply yesterday’s liberalism. So far the libertarian streak of American political thought has prevented a descent into all out Jacobinism.

WWI put an end to European conservatism because after it had ended there was no more ancien regime to conserve. What passed for the right became alternative versions of revolutionary socialism. The only politically successful reactionary of the 20th Century was Franco, who restored the Spanish monarchy on his death. The cultural cesspool that Spain has since become not only shows the uselessness for the right of purely political victories but also illustrates how little there is left to conserve even in Western culture.

There seems to be a running consensus in the comments that the American rebels were classical liberals, heirs to the Enlightenment and Locke. That is partly true. But it’s also important to remember the civic republican strand running through their thought. Property holders preserve their rights against both the encroachments of the central government and the corrupting influence of rootless moneyed and commercial wealth. This certainly is a coherent political philosophy, and “conservative” since the days of Cicero; it is also just as clearly a kind of fig leaf justifying rule by the rich–a certain kind of rich. This too, has very little to do with the modern American right, which seems to look to rootless transnational speculators as its ideal “new man.”

You assert that classical conservatism sees human relations as part of a providential order and you may be right, but only if you restrict your definition of classical conservative (in a rather circular way) to those who can be thus characterised.

Yet, to my mind the scepticism of Hume and the robust pessimism of Hobbes are as essential to the English conservative tradition, as is the providentialism of Burke. Moreover, Burke’s providentialism was of a highly pragmatic variety, enabling him to explain away the 1688 Revolution in ways that would surely have shocked the legitimist likes of Robert Filmer.

Moreover, following Burke’s demise, British conservatism only produced one religious conservative thinker of any significance, viz: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who hardly fitted into the “Great Chain of Being” school. In contrast, it produced a raft of secular thinkers from Sir Henry Maine to Michael Oakeshott and (latterly) John Gray.

The gulf between pragmatic, sceptical and consensual British conservatism on the one hand and the reactionary legitimism of the continent is, of course, almost as great as that which divides the two of them from the populist economic liberalism that passes for conservatism in the United States.

But British conservatism does have a continental equivalent. It’s called Christian Democracy. And (pace Burke and de Maistre) the British conservative and European Christian Democrat traditions have no essential problem with democratic government.

In countries with consensual and pluralistic traditions, they rightly recognise Democracy as a vital and essential part of the social fabric that they seek to maintain.

Interesting article. I appreciate the statement that all of this has little to do with partisan politics in the US today. I like the idea that to think conservative is to have doubt, to be wary of certainty. In other words, to be conservative is to be careful: look before you leap, and don’t leap if you don’t have to. All of the most destructive periods of human history have been predicated upon belief in an ideal world and blind faith in “the end justifies the means”.

My view differs. I think the Enlightenment put in place a structure of principles of liberty, equality and perfection, but left open the question whether all of these competing principles could be satisfied in a social structure consistent with the others. A progressive believes the most free society is the most equal and perfects the potentialities of its citizens most; the conservative believes one gains only at the expense of the others, because of inherent limits to human nature. The progressive is utopian, the conservative tragic. This is the basis for a rational argument, and by the way a very interesting one, but sadly one we are not having.

“As the essay appears to indicate, at least in part, conservatisim is a way to raise young men to be ordered and self-sacrificing gentlemen. There can be rich predatory boobs; and poor geniuses of the cut-throat variety. But if we have the gentlemen, dear sirs, there is the chance the world may be a more tolerable and charitable place.”

What an asinine sentiment. When these same “gentlemen” ruled, every species of deprivation was accepted — not for them, of course. But for the “lesser” people and let’s not forget the indigenous people of the world whose only sin was not being born European/American/white, life was hell.

Better for the world that every last “gentlemen” is strangled to death with his own bowels.

“What an asinine sentiment. When these same “gentlemen” ruled, every species of deprivation was accepted — not for them, of course. But for the “lesser” people and let’s not forget the indigenous people of the world whose only sin was not being born European/American/white, life was hell.” So saith Woody Tanaka.

Woody, for the indigenous people of the world, life would have been hell in any case. It was that way then; it is that way now, despite the efforts of the European to help them.

I learned something from this essay. The view of humans as part of a social web comes from reaction to the French Revolution. Since the fall of the Bastille postdates the American Revolution, that social view has never dominated the American strand of conservatism, leaving American conservatism with its insane view of a society of atoms (a.k.a. individuals).

A couple of things: one, the vision that Burke at al were articulating was defunct almost from the start. Forget the French Revolution for a moment and consider the other major transformations and patterns that were operative: global trade, global colonialism, emergent capitalism, emergent industrialism, and the consolidation of the modern nation-state. All of these shifts and movements, or whatever we want to call them, fundamentally transformed the nature of human lives and societies across the globe. The sorts of worlds Burke and others described were already changing, succumbing to forces beyond their control. The organic societies, organic webs of authority- these would give way to new relations of society, increasingly oriented towards capitalist extraction and production on the one hand, and towards new forms of governmental, statist rule on the other (and in fact, the two were inextricably mixed). Some aspects of Burke’s thought, for instance, deal with these sorts of things; hence his protest against British imperialism in India.

But in the end, whatever its intrinsic merits or demerits, classical conservatism was doomed. Even if the outer form of the ancien regime could have been maintained, by some stretch of human effort and imagination, the inner life of human societies was being fundamentally changed. The emergence of modern capitalism, industrialism, and statist governance, meant the evisceration of this classical conservatism. Fascism is arguably one of the results of this evisceration; the good old days appeal of fascism built upon the reality of traditional (in the sense of pre-capitalism, pre-statism) societies dislocated and ruptured. However, I don’t think fascism was or is the only result. I would argue that a tradition generally not tied to conservatism, the radical working class tradition (particularly in Britain) also came out of something of a conservative background. Look at the ideals of trade unions, mutual self-help societies, etc., in nineteenth century Britain. While radical in their political alignments, their basic goals were what we might describe as communitarian: the recreation of society in the face of the dislocation of state and capital. Rather than seek the recreation of a pseudo-feudal order or even the world small-holder craftsmen and paternalistic gentlemen (a not entirely bad world, mind you, but one long gone), they sough to erect a new world in confrontation with the new, revolutionary one in which they lived.

I thought this was a very interesting and informative review. The idea of an autocratic monarchy restrained by customary obligations, in particular by religion, to me clearly harks back to the doctrine of “symphony of powers”, which you find among the early days of the Christian Roman Empire (later known as the Byzantine Empire). This doctrine survived longer in the Christian East than in the West, where it was damaged by the later rivalry between popes and feudal rulers, and the consequent confusion over whether the spiritual and temporal swords should be wielded by the Church alone or the State alone, rather than by each, respectively. But clearly some vestiges of the old notion that the king reserved all temporal authority to himself, while subject to the spiritual authority of the Church, survives in the thought of Maistre and other continental conservatives.

The observation that traditional conservatives thought in terms of communal ties of obligations, rather than rights, is also spot on. Again, this is the traditional Christian conception of man’s purpose in society; the language of “human rights” is completely foreign to the traditionalist mindset. Solzhenitsyn made some very important observations along these lines, a propos of the ways in which both West and East in the Cold War used the language of rights, rather than obligations, to claim the moral high ground (the West as defender of democracy and civil liberties, the Communists as defenders of the “rights” to food and work).

Samuel Goldman has given us an astute and nuanced antidote to Corey Robin’s slanted portrait of conservatism. Yet we should also be grateful to Robin. He has done us a great favor by offering us a nuanced and rich view of the inner core of leftist animus, and the heady mix of false pretence and fond fantasy on which it feeds. As if any political stance is about anything other than power: who should exercise it, for what ends, and on what conditions. As he said in a recent essay, “They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, democracy, revolution.” And why? Why, to replace the powers that be with their own brand and exercise of power, of course. That is why invariably the powers that be, which Corey Robin insists on calling their “superiors” but which in reality are their competitors and rivals for the levers of power, have resisted their stance of overthrow of the prevailing order for an untried and therefore shimmering alternative. And on those occasions when despite that resistance these forces have carried the day and succeeded, the result has been – perhaps after a brief period of loosened reins – an expansion and consolidation of the scope and power of the state. Invariably so when these forces have been on the left, and the farther left the more so: in these latter cases to such an extent, in fact, that the very possibility of similar protests and movements was stamped out for good within their jurisdiction. So we can see that Corey Robin treats us to an elaborate exercise of the pot calling the kettle black, fuelled by the anarchism-tinged fantasy that the scenarios of the St. Louis or Seattle strikes, or why not Chomsky’s Barcelona uprising, were or could ever be anything other than ephemeral interludes carried by the enthusiasm of the moment. It is the human reality of power, and their own lust for it, that is the unrecognized blindspot of the left, unrecognized, or unacknowledged, at least by themselves, and to judge by the self-righteousness of Corey Robin’s stance, perhaps even to themselves.

This article is very good.
Conservativism is absolutely a ““reactionary ideology” that defends hierarchy against the upheavals that began with the French Revolution.” Therefore it does have some merit to me and should continue to exist in some limited form or another.

The danger lies when conservatism begins to fail due to the many characteristics of liberal democracy(demographics,cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism) conservatives will sometimes see the writing on the wall. They know there days are numbered. Its just a matter of time.

When that happens they will sometimes align themselves with armed folks from the countryside who preach national palingenesis. That is the point in which Facism can rise in liberal democracy. Conservatives are certainly not Fascist, who are actually themselves revolutionaries of the right(the left will never understand this). But at points conservatives ally with Fascist since that is the only way they can continue to be viable in the greater society.

A very thoughtful essay. True, the libertarian strand of conservatism stresses, among other things, the autonomy of the individual, and thus goes against the grain of Burkean conservatism but unless I am misunderstanding him, in the penultimate paragraph the author seems to suggest that libertarians are among those who are driving the “adventurist foreign policy” (to the shame of BOTH political parties). In point of fact it’s quite the opposite, to which anyone who has followed Ron Paul’s rather quixotic campaign will attest.

“Conservatism defends the authority of lords, of generals, of kings—but not of a “leader” who emerges from and rules over the disorganized mob.”

The modern conservative movement lavishes praise on the figure of the entrepreneur: The man with a vision who preserves in the market and establishes a profitable business. How is this not the very definition of your ‘leader’ who emerges and rules over the disorganized mob?

Do any of you so callled classical conservatives stop to think how ridiculous it is to be holding a philosophy that rejects the Enlightenment and the French Revolution 200 years after it happened? God is dead. Get over it.

Essentially, a conservative is someone who wishes to conserve. She does not believe that change is necessarily for the best, that human nature is primarily benign or that reason plays much part in human behaviour. But he does believe that the foolishness of any given individual or generation is offset by the wisdom our species has acquired down the millennia and that this wisdom is imminent in time-honoured laws, institutions and customs.

The conservative might hold to these beliefs because, like Burke, she believes human history to be the working out of a providential plan. But he might also hold them on essentially non-religious, pragmatic and utilitarian grounds. Indeed, he may well feel his beliefs to be buttressed rather than challenged by Darwinism and the expansion of empirical science and historical knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an expansion that revealed the apparently tenuous serendipity of humankind’s place on our planet and in the cosmos.

Being rightly distrustful of untrammelled rationality, a conservative, whether secular or religious in orientation, tends to distrust tight doctrinal formulations, be they those of market fundamentalism (which most Americans paradoxically think of as ‘conservatism’), ‘scientific’ socialism or the ‘Great Chain of Being’ hierarchical legitimism wrongly, to my mind, suggested by this article as essential to an understanding of conservatism.

So where will you find the conservatives of the early twenty-first century? Primarily on the centre, or even the centre-left of the political spectrum. A conservative will wish to conserve jobs, communities and a culture of social compassion, not because these are human rights or sign posts on the path to Utopia, but because they are essential to the continuance of civilised polities and are expressions of the effort and experience of generations. Without them, we might be plunged into a war of all against all, similar to that postulated by Hobbes.

Our conservative will certainly not believe in the ‘heroic destruction’ beloved of economic rationalists. Nor will he wish to see the institutions of the state undermined by a reluctance of its wealthier citizens to pay taxes. She tends to have a sense of history and will recognises how such parsimony helped undermine the Roman Empire and many subsequent polities. At the same time, our conservative will be wary of the dead hand of bureaucracy and will resist the politicisation of personal, social or economic life.

The conservative respects the inherited wisdom of the ages. She strives to be mature, responsible and, above all, sceptical. He knows that wishes are not horses and that his responsibilities are as important as his rights. She is, alas, an endangered species. But he would feel a mite less endangered if market fundamentalists, populist furies and religious maniacs were not so keen to claim his mantle.

As someone who has considered himself an anarchist, an anarcho-syndicalist, a socialist, a Communist, a Republican, a Libertarian, a classical conservative, a neo-con and now nothing, I have to say the comments are a nice addition to this piece. Really good.